E-commerce

Pick by where your constraint is:

• Shopify if you want to sell this month and never touch a server. Everything works out of the box; you pay a monthly fee plus, on the lower plans, a fee on each sale.
• WooCommerce if you already have WordPress, want to own everything and are comfortable with maintenance. No transaction fee beyond your payment processor.
• Custom if your selling process is unusual — complex pricing rules, B2B tiers, a configurator, deep ERP integration.

For most small businesses starting out, it is Shopify for simplicity or WooCommerce for ownership. Custom becomes worth it once the platform is actively costing you sales.

For scaling in the US market, Shopify is the default answer and it is a defensible one: payment processing, tax handling across states, shipping integrations and a large app ecosystem all work without engineering effort.

Where it stops being obvious is margin. Shopify's fees are a percentage of revenue, so they grow exactly as you succeed. A store doing $500k a year pays meaningfully more than the same store on WooCommerce with a good host.

The usual path: start on Shopify because speed matters more than fees at low volume, then reassess around the point where platform fees exceed what a migration plus self-managed hosting would cost.

Neither wins outright — they win different categories:

• Speed to launch: Shopify. Days rather than weeks.
• Total cost at volume: WooCommerce. No revenue share.
• Maintenance burden: Shopify. They handle updates, security and uptime.
• Flexibility and ownership: WooCommerce. Your code, your database, your rules.
• SEO ceiling: WooCommerce, slightly — more control over URLs, structured data and page speed.
• Support when something breaks at 2 a.m.: Shopify, clearly.

The honest summary: Shopify trades money for time and peace of mind. WooCommerce trades time and responsibility for money and control. Decide which of those you have more of.

Above roughly 5,000 products, the decision changes: it stops being about selling and starts being about managing data.

What matters then:

• Bulk import and update. Can you push a supplier's CSV or API feed daily without touching products by hand?
• Variant handling. Size × colour × material multiplies fast and some platforms slow down badly.
• Search and filtering. With a big catalogue, on-site search becomes your main sales tool.
• Sync with your ERP or stock system, so you never sell something you do not have.

WooCommerce with a proper hosting setup, or a custom build, generally handles large catalogues better than entry-level Shopify plans, mostly because you control the database and the indexing.

Here is the short version that covers most decisions:

• Shopify — monthly fee, possible per-sale fee, fastest to launch, least control. Best for: first store, standard products.
• WooCommerce — hosting cost only, full control, you maintain it. Best for: existing WordPress, tight margins, unusual requirements.
• PrestaShop — strong in Europe, good multi-language and multi-currency handling out of the box.
• Custom — highest upfront cost, no ceiling. Best for: B2B pricing, configurators, deep integrations.

We publish longer write-ups on the FenixL blog, and if you tell us your catalogue size, margin and whether you already sell offline, we will tell you which of these fits — free and without commitment.

Six, and the third is where most projects underestimate the work:

1. Strategy. Catalogue structure, pricing rules, shipping zones, tax treatment.
2. Platform and design. Choice, theme or custom build, mobile-first layouts.
3. Catalogue loading. Products, variants, photos, descriptions, categories. On a big catalogue this is frequently the largest single block of work.
4. Payments and shipping. Gateway, carriers, rates, returns.
5. Testing. Real purchases end to end, on real phones, including failure cases.
6. Launch and measurement. Analytics, abandoned-cart recovery, first-week monitoring.

Ask explicitly who is doing step three. It is the most common source of surprise invoices and missed deadlines.

Technically, the things that decide whether a store sells:

• Speed on mobile. Most traffic is mobile and conversion falls sharply with each extra second of load time.
• A short checkout. Every additional field costs completed orders. Guest checkout is not optional.
• Real product photos, several per item, zoomable.
• Trust signals above the fold: returns policy, delivery times, contact details, reviews.
• Working search and filters, especially beyond a few hundred products.

Commercially, the part people skip: deciding before launch how you will get traffic. A beautiful store with no acquisition plan is the most expensive way to learn that building was the easy part.